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This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. This is a special episode that contains the first of two presentations given at our conference earlier this month about the new series being published by the Church, Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, the first volume of which will be released on Tuesday, September 4. (If you would like to watch the video of this and the other presentations from the 2018 conference, you can still purchase video streaming.)
More information about Saints is available in the April 2018 Newsroom story and at saints.lds.org.
Scott Hales, Women’s Stories in Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days
Scott A. Hales has been a historian/writer for the Church History Department since 2015. He currently works as a writer and story editor for Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, the new four-volume narrative history of the Church. He has a BA in English from Brigham Young University and an MA and PhD in American Literature from the University of Cincinnati. He has published scholarly articles on Mormon and American literature in several academic journals, including Religion and the Arts and The Journal of Transnational American Studies. He currently lives in Eagle Mountain, UT with his wife and five children.
Audio Copyright © 2018 The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, Inc. Any reproduction or transcription of this material without prior express written permission is prohibited.
Scott is the Executive Director of the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology at BYU. Under his leadership the program has been ranked in the top five of all collegiate entrepreneurship programs for each of the past seven years, ranking #2 in 2016. He is also the Founder and Chairman of Omadi, Inc., a venture backed SaaS mobile CRM platform for workforce management, serving the towing/transportation markets. Scott is a long time entrepreneur having co-founded or partnered in building seven companies (harvesting four), including several current ventures. Additionally, he serves on several business and private foundation boards. In 2005, Scott published a significant work, titled Where Have All The Prophets Gone?, a historical, theological book on early Christianity using the Bible, the Pseudepigrapha, the Apocrypha, the Dead Seas Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi Library, and all of the extant early Christian writings. In 2014 Scott published his second book, Do the Mormons Have a Leg to Stand On?: a Critical Look at LDS Doctrines in the Light of the Bible and the Teachings of the Early Christian Church. Scott and his wife Marilyn are the parents of 5 married children and they have 15 grandchildren. Scott serves as Stake President of the Provo Utah YSA 4th Stake.
Michael R. Ash is the author of Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt, Of Faith Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith, as well as Bamboozled by the “CES Letter.” A former columnist for the Deseret News’ Mormon Times, he has also been a frequent contributor to the online blogs, Meridian Magazine, as well as the Mormon Hub. Mike has been published in the Ensign, Sunstone Magazine, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, in the FARMS Review, and most recently contributed a chapter to Kofford Book’s Perspectives in Mormon Theology: Apologetics. Joining FairMormon in the year 2000, Mike delivered a paper at the 2nd annual FairMormon conference and has contributed papers to seven additional conferences (including this one) since. Mike and his wife Chris live in Ogden and are the parents of three daughters and the grandparents of six grandchildren.
Neal Rappleye is the Research Project Manager at Book of Mormon Central and has published on the Book of Mormon in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture. He has presented at the 2014, 2016, and 2017 Book of Mormon Conferences.
Janiece Johnson is a transplanted Bay Area, California, native who loves history, design, art, good food, and traveling. She has master’s degrees in American Religious History and Theology from Brigham Young University and Vanderbilt’s Divinity School respectively. She finished her doctoral work at the University of Leicester in England. Janiece has published work on gender and American religious history—specializing in Mormon history and the prosecution for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. She is a co-author of The Witness of Women: First-hand Experiences and Testimonies of the Restoration (Deseret Book, 2016) and general editor of the recently published Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017). A visiting professor in Religious Education at BYU-Idaho for the last three years, Janiece will begin as a research fellow for the Maxwell Institute’s Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies at BYU this fall.
Ugo A. Perego received a BS and a MS in Health Sciences from Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah) and a PhD in Genetics and Biomolecular Sciences from the University of Pavia (Pavia, Italy) under the mentorship of Professor Antonio Torroni. He is the Director of the Rome Institute Campus, the S&I Coordinator for Central Italy and Malta, and a Visiting Scientist at the University of Pavia. During the past fifteen years, Ugo has given nearly 200 international lectures on DNA topics related to population migrations, ancestry, forensics, and history (including LDS history). Ugo has also authored and co-authored a number of publications, including: “Ancient individuals from the North American Northwest Coast reveal 10,000 years of regional genetic continuity” (in PNAS USA, 2017); “Finding Lehi in America through DNA Analysis” (in Laura Hales’ A Reason for Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine & Church History, 2016); “The first peopling of South America: new evidences from the Y-chromosome haplogroup Q” (in Plos One, 2013); “Reconciling migration models to the Americas with the variation of North American native mitogenomes” (in PNAS USA, 2013); “The Mountain Meadows Massacre and ‘Poisoned Springs’: Scientific Testing of the More Recent, Anthrax Theory” (in International Journal of Legal Medicine, 2012); and “Joseph Smith Jr., the Question of Polygamous Offspring and DNA Analysis” (in Craig Foster and Newell Bringhurst’s The Persistence of Polygamy Vol. 1, 2010). A complete list of his publications is available at 
